Joey Scarpellino didn’t exactly benefit from the so-called ideal circumstances for his first theatrical role, integrating distribution Ladies night, for you ladies only five weeks before the premiere. But staying true to himself, the actor opted for it, head down. “I never put myself under any pressure,” he says.
End of June. Actor Mathieu Baron – whose arrival in the troupe of Ladies Nights, for you Ladies – was announced with great fanfare – is retiring. Then Joey Scarpellino’s phone rang: a good month before the first performance, he was called to back up.
The actor does not hide it: he hesitated, giving himself “time for a weekend” to think about this proposal. “My meeting with Denis Bouchard [le metteur en scène, NDLR] thrown heavily into the balance. I really wanted to work with him. I knew I could learn a lot from this man,” says Joey Scarpellino over the phone.
“In life I like to try new things. So I saw it as a great learning opportunity. I may have been naïve, but I didn’t see the five weeks of preparation as an obstacle. It didn’t stress me at all; There was a lot of time for me to learn my scenes and the choreography,” he explains.
And he did. His first appearance on stage thus passed without the slightest incident – on the contrary – the audience warmly welcomed his work alongside Denis Bouchard, Patrick Emmanuel Abellard, Sébastien Leblanc, Guillaume Rodrigue and Julie Ringuette.
two decades
The undeniable success of Quebec’s entertainment industry, Ladies Night, for you ladies, has been rolling through the province for two decades now. But the production has been completely revised. The choreographies are now signed by Jean-Marc Généreux and the text has been revised and streamlined to be presented without interruption.
The plot remains the same and therefore always takes the viewer back to a mining town where a group of friends who want to fill their free time take on a challenge: put on a striptease show to entertain the fairer sex, but also to prove for themselves that they can still do it.
“We have something really strong on our hands. The atmosphere is like that of a rock show; people are laughing, screaming, clapping their hands… There really is a party atmosphere in the room. And after two and a half years of the pandemic, it feels good to be in a gang and laugh, take your mind off things,” notes Joey Scarpellino.
A first film in English
On the fringes of Ladies Nights for you, expected across Quebec next year, we’ll soon be able to see Joey Scarpellino on the small screen in Stay the Night, his first English-language film, which is due out on Crave in November.
Filmed in Toronto during the pandemic, this romantic comedy follows a chance meeting between a young woman and a professional athlete for one night. What was initially intended as a simple one-night stand will take a much deeper turn for the two main characters.
“My character is at a crossroads in his life. Everything happens in one night. But the pandemic has complicated things a little; Filming must have lasted two years. It wasn’t easy, but I’m pretty proud of this project,” says the actor.
♦ Ladies Night, for you ladies will be presented tonight at Montreal’s Place des Arts. The tour will then resume at L’Assomption on Tuesday.